Enable Transparent Data Encryption

This is one of the things in my Encryption Primer presentation that I don’t demo. It’s really easy to do, and it’s rather mechanical, so I just show the image that has the steps from MSDN and leave it at that.

However there are a few things I wanted to change, and test, so I thought I’d show my procedure on a local database. I roughly follow the MSDN article, but a few slight items.

Encryption is serious stuff. If you lose this certificate from a server crash, you are definitely not going to be able to open your database or recover your data. Gone is gone, and data loss means data loss here.